her father had tried to talk her out of moving into the area, but Hadley being Hadley had dug in and moved into the neighborhood anyway. She’d explained it was not her forever home. It was an investment.
I agreed with Jasper. The complex was nice, but that was all the condo had going for it. Though I had to admit, Hadley had gotten a screaming deal, and once she updated the inside, she could flip it and make a nice profit.
I pulled into her spot under a covered carport and glanced around. Decent cars, trucks, and SUVs were parked in the lot. The landscaping was well-kept, mature trees offered shade, neat flowerbeds were abundant. Lampposts scattered every fifty feet or so provided good lighting.
“Looks better than when you helped move me in, doesn’t it?” Hadley broke the silence. “I love all the flowers. It’s not as pretty as Mom’s yard, but at least it’s something.”
She wasn’t wrong—it was not as pretty as Emily’s yard. That was because Emily tended to her home like she tended to everything else in her life, with nothing but love. I’d been to the Walker home many times and never had I gone over there and seen a single weed in her garden. She liked surrounding herself and the ones she loved with beauty. She enjoyed her home, her yard, and her family.
What would it have been like growing up with Emily Walker as a mother instead of Helen Hewitt? I didn’t have a response to that because the answer was incomprehensible.
“Hey,” Hadley chirped. “As long as you’re here, you wanna see the bathroom I updated? But I need to warn you, most of the downstairs floor is still plywood.” Her nose scrunched. “The new laminate is taking so much longer than I thought it would.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’s the floor taking so long?”
“Well, I didn’t take into consideration having to remove all the baseboards, which was a huge pain in the ass because the builder caulked them to the drywall. Anyway, huge mess trying to get them off without tearing off the drywall paper. Which I did in like five places, so now I’ll need to skim the wall and repaint, but whatever. But I also didn’t think about the waste I’d have cutting the planks to make the joints staggered, so that’s necessitated another trip to Lowe’s to buy more.” She shrugged. “You live and learn. It’s my first time, so I expected some hiccups. I naïvely thought it would only take a week to do the downstairs. I’m on week two and I’m barely halfway done.”
“And you’re doing this by yourself?”
“What’s that mean?” she snapped.
“It means exactly what I asked. You’re laying all that flooring with no help?”
“Why would I need help putting down a laminate floor?”
Good Lord, the woman’s argumentative.
“I don’t know, Hadley. Maybe so it doesn’t take you three months to do something that could take a week if you enlisted the help of the fifty-two million family members you got.”
Her eyes narrowed, her shoulders pushed back, and irritation flashed.
“I’m not asking one of my fifty-two million relatives to come over and help me do something I’m capable of doing on my own. I like to save those favors when I come up against something I can’t do.”
“Really? And how many times have you called them in to help?”
“I haven’t.”
“Right.” I shut down my truck and made a decision I knew I was going to regret. “Let’s go check out your pad.”
“If you point out—”
“Come on, Tim the Tool Man Taylor, let’s go see what you’ve done.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not even a little bit.”
I was actually impressed and I hadn’t even seen the work. But the mere fact she’d done it on her own was impressive enough. And knowing Hadley the way I did, her determination, I was sure everything looked great.
It wouldn’t be for hours later that I’d realize how deeply I’d come to regret going into her home.
A decision I wished greatly I could take back.
4
So, this wasn’t part of my new plan to get Brady’s attention. I actually did have a flat tire and I had stupidly stripped the lug bolts while trying to change the stupid thing. And I had called numerous people before I’d called him for help.
This was not how I wanted to start my new strategy. Hell, I hadn’t even had time to come up with something foolproof. My first thought was a full-scale seduction, but he’d sniff that out a mile away